Continuous Improvement

The Improvement Philosophy

Just sustaining the current performance is inadequate under any environment. Today, most organisations continuously strive to improve. However, the following three aspects often remain as weaknesses:
1. Improvement is often inward looking and relatively less effort is made in distinctly differentiating the offerings to the customers
2. The objectives may not be challenging (aspirational)
3. The means to bring about improvements are often not tested for causality i.e. the means are not checked for necessary and sufficiency conditions to meet the desired objective. Failure to test interventions against appropriate causality leads to making the ‘One size fits all’ approach to target setting as well as the choice of tools and techniques.

The company’s ASPIRE technique helps to set goals and choose the appropriate tools. Under this, certain parts of the planned improvements are checked for causality, explored for means (causes) and then the implementations are carried out using differentiated tools and techniques. For the remaining parts of the aspirational goals the means are innovated as we proceed in the implementation journey.
The future belongs to organisations that can increase the pace of standardisation (to have a robust base), improve quickly on their current operations and continuously innovate to differentiate themselves from the rest.

This can only be achieved by leadership, passion, process and knowledge.

Tata Steel’s TQM journey has made it acknowledge the fact that the only sure way to prosperity in the long run, is to ensure value creation for the system as a whole, starting from the customers to the suppliers.